Soil surface roughness generally relates to the planarity or smoothness of the soil within a field and is typically impacted by uneven soil profiles, soil clumps, crop residue, and foreign objects within the field (e.g., rocks). For various reasons, soil surface roughness is an important field characteristic to consider when performing a ground-engaging operation, such as a tillage operation, a planting operation, a fertilizing operation, and/or the like. For example, the soil surface roughness can impact the environmental quality of the soil, including erosion resistance and moisture content. In addition, the soil surface roughness can affect the seed-bed quality. As such, the ability to monitor and/or adjust the soil surface roughness within a field can be very important to maintaining a healthy, productive field, particularly when it comes to performing various ground-engaging operations.
While various systems and methods have been developed to allow the soil surface roughness within a field to be estimated, such systems and methods have various drawbacks or disadvantages. For example, most conventional surface roughness estimation techniques require manual measurements that can be very time consuming and labor-intensive. To address the issues associated with manual techniques, efforts have been made to develop systems that can automatically measure soil surface roughness. However, to date, such systems have failed to provide a system configuration that allows the change in soil surface roughness occurring as a result of the performance of a ground-engaging operation to be reliably and efficiently monitored.
Accordingly, an improved system and method for automatically monitoring the soil surface roughness of a field during the performance of a ground-engaging operation that overcomes one or more of the issues in the prior art would be welcomed in the technology.